Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Obama: "Arnaldo, what do you think?"

It's a plan to rebuild our economy and win the future -- a plan that will prepare our country and our children for the jobs and industries of tomorrow.

It's a proposal to live within our means so we can invest in our future.

But the budget can be complex, confusing, and easy to distort in a partisan environment. President Obama will rely on our help -- the on-the-ground organizing we know works -- to make the case alongside him.

That's why we want your input.

Take a minute to learn about the President's top budget priorities, and then let us know which is the most important to you.

Your feedback will help guide the work we do and the strategies we employ in the coming months, as the fights in Washington over the budget come to a head.

The President's vision is ambitious yet responsible. While making the tough decisions on some things we can't afford, the budget also makes targeted investments where we need them to create jobs and secure a brighter future for new generations.

It comes down to whether we're able to live up to the vision the President laid out in five pillars:

-- Innovate: Invest heavily in research and development, more than double funding for energy efficiency advances, and put 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

-- Educate: Expand the Race to the Top program, encourage school funding reform by rewarding success and innovation, train 100,000 new math and science teachers, and make it more affordable for millions more students to pay for college.

-- Build: Create hundreds of thousands of jobs off the bat with investments in infrastructure, bring high-speed Internet access to 98 percent of Americans, and support the goal of supplying high-speed rail to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years.

-- Be fiscally responsible: Reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years, bring non-security discretionary spending to the lowest levels since Eisenhower, and live up to the President's pledge to cut the deficit he inherited in half before the end of his first term.

-- Reform government: Embrace competitive grant models that encourage innovation and save taxpayer dollars, cut administrative overhead costs by billions, and establish a process to reorganize government to make it better serve the goal of a competitive America.

Whether we can out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world depends on the direction this country takes right now.

And each of us is a critical messenger for this administration.

When we talk to friends and family, when we knock on our neighbors' doors, and when we discuss the news with coworkers, we communicate so much more than any talking head or political ad ever could.